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Welcome to The Academic Wino! If you are new here, please read the “About Me” page to find out more about myself and the blog. If you would like to receive free updates on articles like this by email, then sign up here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed. Also, check us out on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and or Pinterest. Thanks for visiting!

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(As an aside: how many of you now have that song stuck in your head after reading the title?…ahhhhh high school memories….).

The lights are turned down low, the Barry White is softly pumping through the stereo, and you’ve got yourself a nice big glass of red wine and your lover by your side…OK, without starting to making this sound too much like a bad porno movie, I’ll let your mind wander however you’d like with that and shift into a more scientific mode…

Quite some time ago, I covered an article discussing the relationship between alcohol consumption and the success rate of in vitro fertilization. This study found that increased levels of alcohol consumption negatively affects fertilization success when consumed by either men and women, though they only considered more heavy consumption (at least 4 drinks) and did not differentiate between the different types of alcohol.

Very basically, in order to have successful fertilization, a sperm must be able to penetrate the exterior wall of the egg by producing and releasing a specific type of enzyme to break down that wall. This can either happen naturally by copulation (wah wah wee wah…) or by in vitro methods outside of the body.

See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In addition to estrogens, studies have also found many compounds present in the environment that possess similar sperm activation activities and capabilities. Specifically, genistein, quercetin, and 8-prenylnaringenin; all classified as phytoestrogens; have been shown to have these estrogen-like activities. Genistein is found in soy and legumes, quercetin is found in parsley and red wine, and 8-prenylnaringenin is found in hops and beer. Though these compounds may behave similarly to estrogen in terms of the ability to activate sperm for fertilization, some research has indicated that “too much” of these compounds can instead have an inhibitory effect and negatively affect fertilization success.

Myricetin is another compound very similar to quercetin, which is found in very high levels in berries, tea, and red wine. According to the study presented today, very few studies have examined the effects of these estrogen-like compounds in male human reproduction, and in particular no studies have examined Myricetin. In other studies not related to human reproduction, the effects of Myricetin have been mixed: some studies have found it has antioxidative properties, while other studies have found just the opposite. Similarly, some studies have shown Myricetin has anti-carcinogen properties, while other studies have found the compound promotes tumor growth. What about the effects of Myricetin in male human reproduction? Is it helpful? Or detrimental? To date, no studies have examined this topic.

By Gilberto Santa Rosa from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (be_sperm.) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Methods

To collect sperm samples, donors made sweet love to a plastic cup after 3 days of abstaining from any sexual activities. Those sperm with normal volume, count, motility, vitality and morphology were pooled together and processed.

Pooled sperm samples were separated into different treatments: 10nM Myricetin; 100nM Myricetin; 1μM Myricetin; 100nM Myricetin with 1μM ICl, AbERα, AbERβ, or 10μM LY. Positive (capacitated sperm) and negative (incapacitated sperm) controls were used. Sperm were exposed to the treatments for a 30 minute period.

The following were measured after treatment exposures: sperm protein, sperm mobility and viability, cholesterol levels in sperm, acrosin activity, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase activity, and Acyl-CoA dehydrogenase activity.

Results

• Stimulation with 10nM and 100nM of Myricetin resulted in a 25% and 50% increase in sperm motility, respectively.
o The 100nM result was the same as the positive control.
• Stimulation with the greatest level of Myricetin (1μM) resulted in a decrease in sperm motility compared with the control and other Myricetin treatments.
• Stimulation with 10nM and 100nM of Myricetin resulted in a 20% and 30% increase in sperm viability, respectively.
o The 100nM result was the same as the positive control.
• All Myricetin treatments resulted in significant increases of cholesterol in sperm.
o The 100nM result was similar to the positive control and the 1μM treatment was less effective than the 10nM and 100nM treatments.
• Treating the sperm samples with combinations of Myricetin and either ICl, AbERα, AbERβ, or LY resulted in the reversal of this trend and effectively rendered the sperm incapacitated.
o This suggests that Myricetin may play an important role in the activation of sperm samples at certain concentrations.
• For the 10nM and 100nM Myricetin treatments, there was a significant increase in acrosin activity compared with the controls, with the 100nM treatment showing a greater increase than the 10nM treatment.
o The 100nM treatment showed a 70% increase in acrosin activity compared with the negative controls, which was almost equal to the result for the positive control.
• The highest concentrations of phosphorylated AKT were found in the 100nM Myricetin treatment samples, which was about 5 times greater than the untreated negative control.
• 100nM and 1μM Myricetin treatments showed greater increases in glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase activity than the 10nM treatment, with the 100nM Myricetin treatment being the most effective.
• Stimulation with 10nM and 100nM of Myricetin resulted in a 10% and 40% increase in acyl-CoA dehydrogenase activity compared with the untreated negative control, with the 100nM treatment being the most effective.

Conclusions

The results of this study generally showed that exposure of sperm to lower doses of Myricetin improved their mobility and viability/survival, while the higher doses of Myricetin were not as effective.

In order for a sperm to fertilize an egg, it must first become “capacitated”, which allows it to produce the enzymes necessary to penetrate the hard exterior shell of the egg and increase success of fertilization. To be successfully capacitated, cholesterol levels in sperm must increase, as well as the induction of phosphorylation of specific proteins. The results of this study showed that Myricetin, when exposed to sperm at lower doses and for a short period of time, is effective in capacitating the sperm and increasing their capacity to produce the enzymes necessary to successfully fertilize an egg by inducing these same responses in sperm samples.

While the results of this in vitro (in the lab/petri dish) study are fascinating, I’m not convinced we’d see the same thing in vivo (i.e. in the body). First, this study does not take into consideration the effect of the body’s surrounding environment on this mechanism. What I mean is that when the sperm are swimming around in the female reproductive tract, they are exposed to a lot of compounds and hormones that weren’t examined in this study. How do these female hormones and compounds influence the efficacy of Myricetin on sperm performance?

Recall: Myricetin is a compound with estrogen-like characteristics. Also recall: Myricetin at the highest doses was not as effective (and sometime inhibitory) as the lower doses in sperm performance. So, think about it: what happens when you have your sperm exposed to a small dose of Myricetin but then placed in the presence of the estrogen compounds in the female reproductive tract? Wouldn’t this result in increased estrogen-like compound concentrations and ultimately reduce the effectiveness of the Myricetin? I’m not sure, but I think a study somehow incorporating a more natural environment as found in the female reproductive tract is necessary to determine how sperm performance will be altered in “real life”.

Even if Myricetin actually does perform as similarly in vivo as it does in vitro, how much wine would a man need to drink in order to beef up his sperm performance? Studies have shown that myricetin and quercetin make up 20-50% of the flavonol component of red wine, ranging from 53 to 200mg/L.

By Meister des Rasikapriyâ-Manuskripts [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I would certainly take these results with a grain of salt if I were you. It’s very possible that the interaction between the Myricetin in the red wine and the estrogen in the female reproductive tract result in a inhibitory or toxic effect on the sperm, which is something that should really be studied before any real conclusions can be made here. I do wonder if when in in vitro fertilization scenarios, a man drinking a glass or two of red wine prior to donating sperm and the fertilization of the egg outside of the female body (i.e. thus without the excess estrogen) would be as beneficial as we saw in the results of this study.

Of course, a lot more research needs to be done in this field, so certainly talk with your doctor about your alcohol consumption habits if you are trying to conceive. Maybe we’ll learn more about the interaction of red wine and sperm performance in the female reproductive tract in subsequent experiments; however this study does give some indication that red wine or at the very least Myricetin supplements could play an important role in human reproductive success (or failure).

What do you all think of this study? Please share your thoughts!

Source: Aquila, S., Santoro, M., De Amicis, F., Guido, C., Bonofiglo, D., Lanzino, M., Cesario, M.G., Perrotta, I., Sisci, D., and Morelli, C. 2013. Red Wine Consumption May Affect Sperm Biology: The Effects of Different Concentrations of Phytoestrogen Myricetin on Human Male Gamete Function. Molecular Reproduction and Development 80: 155-165.

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Welcome to The Academic Wino! If you are new here, please read the “About Me” page to find out more about myself and the blog. If you would like to receive free updates on articles like this by email, then sign up here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed. Also, check us out on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and or Pinterest. Thanks for visiting!

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The following is a guest post by Larry Chandler: wine sales and marketing guru!  Please see his bio at the end of this post for more information!

This is blog post #2 billion on wine marketing. Everybody writes about it. A few of them even have something important to say.

So in summary:

1. Know your market
2. Write well
3. Watch the money roll in.

Ok, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. #3 is patently false. #2 means nothing, you either write well or know how to hire well or perhaps neither. So you may need to work on this. But #1 is the most important here, and that’s what we’ll discuss.

Let’s assume you want to sell wine. Let’s assume you actually make wine or work for a winery. Let’s also assume you make good wine. Selling bad wine requires a skill far beyond our abilities here.

Marketing and selling are not the same thing. To paraphrase marketing guru Peter Drucker, “The aim of wine marketing is to make selling wine superfluous.” So where do you start? Marketing involves everything about your brand: what your labels look like, where you might talk about your wine (advertising, social

This photo is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the ARC Identifier (National Archives Identifier) 515058. [PUBLIC DOMAIN]

Who buys your wine now? Do you even know? Do you have a tasting room? If so, you do ask for their email addresses and maybe their phone numbers. No? Why not? They are your customers. They want to buy more at some point. Don’t ignore them. Everyone talks about social media (incessantly). Important, yes. But do not neglect email. It’s still (as of this writing) crucial.

If you don’t have a tasting room, do you do winemaker dinners? Tastings at festivals? Wine store events? Do you ask for emails there?

Do you have a Facebook page? Do you bother to post interesting content? Do you reply to comments placed on your page? Facebook is not simply advertising by the way. Or shouldn’t be. Engagement (responding to people) works.

Do you perform target marketing? Do you choose to market to men, women, young people, existing customers, lovers of a particular variety, big or small spenders?

Do you check out case studies or ask other winemakers how they do it? Will a favorable or unfavorable review of your wine change your plans? Many people today denigrate existing wine publications, such as the Wine Spectator or the Wine Advocate. Don’t. Maybe they are dying breeds, but they sure ain’t dead yet. And a high score can do wonders for your brand. This may change as younger people pay less attention to wine scores.

So is this marketing science? Could be. Is it just wild guessing? Could be. How much time can you spend on reading about marketing, taking seminars, talking to fellow winemakers? You can drown in a sea of data. After all, there are only 48 hours in a day.

The answer to where you go from here, how you market is simple. Start doing it. Learn some of the basics of analytics, who your customers are, and market to them. But don’t spend all your time on it. Create a marketing plan, but don’t wait until it is perfect. Send out an email, but don’t assume you will start moving all your product. Test it, perhaps an A/B test. See if a discount works better than free shipping. Learn from this. Create interesting content, but don’t wait forever for inspiration to hit. (A short wait is fine.) Go with what you know now and spend time with the results and try it again. You may only get one chance to make your 2013 Chardonnay, but you can re-do your marketing efforts.

There is no one answer for every winery. Learn what works for you. Your winery is unique. Even with 8,000 other wineries in the US, your strategy needs to be unique to you. There is no one like you with your same product mix, your same price points, your same customers.

We know of one winery that makes only 2,000 cases of their very well respected wine, and distributes only within California. They noticed they were getting wine club members from all over the country. When they asked those new members how they heard of this brand, all replied that they had this wine in restaurants in California. So the winery knew it had to focus even more on getting on the wine lists of restaurants in California.

You can pay for marketing advice and expertise if you can afford it. If not, you

Photo By NBC Television [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In summary:

1. Set up a business plan.
2. Create a marketing strategy
3. Develop tactics to fulfill your strategy
4. Learn from your mistakes
5. Try again

Oh, and don’t forget mobile devices and marketing specifically for that. But that’s a whole ‘nother post.

Wine Marketing is a science. But like making wine, it is part science, part art, and part magic.

Bio: Larry Chandler has been involved in marketing and selling wine for 20 years for both wine retailers and wineries. He also conducts tastings and lectures on wine and food pairings. His wine blog is http://overabarrel.wordpress.com and can be reached at larry@larrychandler.com.

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Welcome to The Academic Wino! If you are new here, please read the “About Me” page to find out more about myself and the blog. If you would like to receive free updates on articles like this by email, then sign up here or you can subscribe to the RSS feed. Also, check us out on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and or Pinterest. Thanks for visiting!

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To view a complete list of all the books I have reviewed on The Academic Wino, visit my Wine Book Library page and browse!

This book review is nearly a year in the making, as technically I bought the book almost a year ago! Of course, I had a long list of other books ahead of it I needed to review first, and am just now getting to this one! Phew!

The book I reviewed for today is one of the view wine novels that have fallen into my lap so far. I enjoy mixing up my usual scientific and otherwise nonfiction books with an entertaining novel, and this book is certainly one that I would recommend to the wine lover who wants to be entertained for entertainments sake!

Vertical by Rex Pickett is the awaited sequel to his novel Sideways, which most if not all of you know was the inspiration for the movie sharing the same name. I purchased this book during the Wine Bloggers Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2012, as Rex was the keynote speaker for the conference and I wanted not only the book but also an autograph! He gave a great talk full of stories and entertaining anecdotes of his successes and failures as a writer. Naturally, I wanted to pick up the sequel, Vertical, and crack it open as soon as I could (which happened to be nearly a year later, but we’ll pretend that didn’t happen).

TO PURCHASE VERTICAL BY REX PICKETT, CLICK HERE TO PICK IT UP FROM AMAZON.COM!

Vertical starts off about 7 years later in Miles life, after he made it big by writing a best-selling novel which made him very wealthy after a movie was made based off that book. The Miles we knew back in Sideways is finally rolling in the dough, up to his elbows in women (literally), and is really playing up his celebrity status in true “rock and roll” style. His buddy Jack is back as well, though in the past 7 years life has not been quite as kind as they have been for Miles. Finally, during the last few years Miles’ mother had a stroke, as well as a series of other rather dramatic health issues and is now miserably camped out in a nursing home that she so desperately wants to leave.

Wanting to honor his mother’s wishes to leave the nursing home and take her to live with her sister in Wisconsin, Miles and Jack team up along with his mother’s nurse aide for a wild, over-the-top road tripping adventure through much of the west coast all the way to Wisconsin. The situations Miles and company are put in throughout the novel are often hilarious and at times ridiculously unbelievable (but hey-anything can happen in a novel!). Several times I laughed out loud while saying “whaaaaat??” during several of the outrageous scenes in the book. You’ll want to pick up Vertical to see for yourself what kind of shenanigans Miles and Jack get into, as I don’t wish to through any spoilers in this review!

Vertical by Rex Pickett is a fantastically entertaining book, with exciting and graphic descriptions of debaucherous jaunts and twists and turns that will make your jaw drop! If you loved Sideways, you’ll love Vertical! Next time you’re in the mood for a humorous and enthralling book to pair with your glass of wine, pick up Vertical and prepare to be entertained!

To purchase Vertical by Rex Pickett, click here to pick it up from Amazon.com!